McDermott Will & Emery and Baker & McKenzie, the international law firms, today announced their support of the first ever link-up between Cambridge Faculty of Law and Harvard Law School. Two Cambridge law students will spend one year at Harvard studying for the LLM - one of these students will be known as the Baker & McKenzie Scholar and the other will be known as the McDermott Will & Emery Scholar.
The continuing globalisation of law and its clients has led to increased demand for lawyers with international experience and understanding. In recognition of this, two leading law firms have come together with two of the best law schools in the world to support an innovative scheme which will help develop internationally-minded law students.
Baker & McKenzie’s involvement with the project underlines the firm’s continued support of legal academia; earlier this year the firm announced that it has created an endowment to fund an annual International Law Lecture Series at Georgetown University Law Center. The inaugural lecture was held in April 2004.
The new scholarship reflects McDermott Will & Emery’s commitment to promoting links between the UK and the US and encouraging seamless interaction between lawyers from all jurisdictions. The scheme complements the ethos of McDermott Will & Emery’s London office’s graduate recruitment programme which, because the office takes on just two trainees per year, enables the firm to fast-track the career development of exceptionally talented young lawyers.
Christine Lagarde, Chairman of Baker & McKenzie’s Executive Committee, said “We are delighted to support this innovative and inspirational project which, with its exchange of ideas, experience, learning and cultures, strongly reflects the ethos of our firm. The benefits of the project for all involved are clear and we look forward to supporting outstanding scholars on the brink of their careers in the years to come.”
McDermott Will & Emery Chairman Harvey Freishtat explained “This is an exciting programme and highlights our profession’s increasing need and value of young attorneys with an international outlook and understanding. We encourage our associates to take part in our internal secondment programme in order to gain this valuable multi-jurisdictional understanding and are delighted to be encouraging the same perspective among students during their law school years.”
Cambridge University Faculty of Law Chair Professor James Crawford stated “We are extremely pleased that law firms as prominent as McDermott Will & Emery and Baker & McKenzie are supporting this new initiative. This is a very exciting programme as it is the first such academic exchange undertaken by Harvard and we hope it will encourage similar traffic between other institutions. It also offers a major incentive to our own students to perform as well as they possibly can and to consider further study in law before embarking on their legal careers.”
The scholarship covers tuition fees plus travel and maintenance. As well as the scholarship, the student will be offered opportunities whilst in the US to meet McDermott Will & Emery and Baker & McKenzie lawyers. Harvard University are concurrently supporting four Harvard students studying at Cambridge University.
Further information can be found at the Baker & McKenzie and Mc Dermott Will & Emery websites. This press release with additional notes for editors is available for download in PDF and Word
formats.